On Fri, 31 Oct 1997 15:38:05 -0500 (EST),
Michael R Zucca <mrz5149@cs.rit.edu> wrote:
> > Second, the color X server doesn't support greyscale (oops!).  It only
> > supports B&W and 8-bit pseudo-color modes.  Therefore, even if your
> > kernel did support your RasterOps card, X server couldn't run in
> > greyscale mode.  I might work on it one of those days, but when, I
> > have no idea.
> 
> It's funny actually. For most cards, grayscale mode and color mode aren't
> really any different. You just set a flag internally and the card mixes
> the RGB channels so that they appear as grayscale. The server shouldn't
> worry too much about whether the card is in color or grayscale. It should
> just worry about whether it's in 8 bit mode or not.

Well, you might end up running the server in pseudo-color mode
displaying in greyscale.  The net effect is less than desired.

> Just out of curiosity, what kinds of changes did you have to make to the
> server? Did you just have to patch in some code to check/change the modes
> and change the CLUT or did you actually have to go in and write drawing
> routines?

No, I didn't write any drawing routines even though I could have.  I
wrote only some routines that changes CLUT via Taras' color grf
ioctl() calls, and built the server with both mfb and cfb8 built in.

> You may want somebody to get your source since we're moving from the old
> X server to an XFree86 style server.

Yes, that's the idea behind calling for a volunteer ;-)

> I'm also planning on adding hardware page flipping support calls so
> somebody might want to add some code to accelerate X using that.

How would X server utilize this?

Cheers,

Ken